I took the ock to Poland

Celebrating the boat's triumph of formal nostalgia

Today I awoke to news that the wock had made its way to Poland. I didn’t know what this meant; now, I do.

There’s a timeline, I gather. A viral snippet leaks. Buzz generates. Spotify, the multinational streaming corporation, tweets about Codeine. Poland by Lil Yachty is streaming.

I clicked on the link I was sent, something I rarely do anymore. I felt, in my heart of hearts, that something new was happening. I was half right.

“Poland” is a breath of fresh air precisely because it is something old. This song – its leaking, its release, its reception, its pure, unfettered absurdist mania – we have seen and heard this before. Is it possible to be nostalgic for the year 2015? Time moves differently now, so sure, why not?

In its 83 seconds, “Poland” reminds me what made me fall in love with rap music in the first place by cutting through the noise that wrenched me out of love. It is, both formally and conceptually, incredibly stupid. Yachty announces a fact of tremendous significance: he took the wock to Poland. His autotuned warble pitches in and out of range like a soul passing between two planes. The song conveys a real, felt sense of emotion. This news is delivered matter-of-factly, without a hint of triumph. The wock is in Poland now. Listen to Yachty’s ghostly moans and tell me that the wock got there without a cost.

There’s a verse – it doesn’t matter. The song ends – it doesn’t matter. You play it again. You feel a sense of exhilaration. For the first time in forever, you have been presented with a new idea. Wock. Poland. The clarity of prose, the precision of sentiment, is exactly that which is required to foster an online conversation. You and the people on your screen are joined, for the first time in a long time, in a sort of community built around your predilections for the world of playfully mundane, eerily profound flexes. For 83 seconds, listening to rap does not make you feel like you are in a Sprite commercial.

And so it is 2015 again. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you see the tweets? Can’t you start to hear the remixes? Haven’t you taken a moment to imagine the soulless Drake remix to come? The breathless Pitchfork article attempting to cast this song as a political statement in protest of Brittney Griner’s detention? The impossibly corny Vice “investigation” about how and when Yachty did the impossible and got the wock to Poland? Didn’t you miss when things, even deeply stupid ones, felt possible?

Whether or not Yachty’s heroism will spark a moment of cultural generation remains to be seen. For now, though, one thing is certain: the wock is in Poland. Act accordingly.